WEEK 9: TWENTIETH-CENTURY PARIS, EXISTENTIALISM, AND

MAY 1968/SURREALISM
Powerpoint Lecture: Paris and Surrealism/Paris and Music
Surrealism (1910s-1920s)
❖ The Surrealist movement was officially established in 1924
❖ It anticipated Existentialism in its awareness of the absurdity of life
❖ Its aesthetic was to combine dreams and reality
❖ Its leader, André Breton, claimed to “resolve the previously contradictory conditions
of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality, or surreality.”
❖ It was in part a reaction to Enlightenment rationality and a desire to explore the
imaginative powers of the irrational and the unconscious, influenced by Freud and
psychoanalysis
❖ Based in Paris, Surrealism was linked to Communism and Anarchism
❖ It emphasized the element of surprise, unexpected juxtaposition, and non-sequitur
❖ It was very influenced by Dadaism and its focus on the absurd
❖ This anti-realist art is also often perceived as a reaction to the senseless horror and
deaths of WWI

Sigmund Freud and Psychoanalysis

❖ Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
❖ Founder of psychoanalysis, which uses free association to unlock causes of patients’
symptoms
❖ Freud also analyzed dreams as a form of wish-fulfillment
❖ Freud developed a theory of the unconscious and the theory of the mechanism of
repression
❖ According to Freud, civilization is based on our ongoing repression of our ‘baser’
instincts: erotic drives, aggression, neurotic guilt, etc
❖ The unconscious part of our psyche is what we cannot access through our conscious
mind, and it emerges in symptomatic ways
❖ Freud challenged the ‘rational’ model of subjectivity, showing how we are split,
fragmented subjects, never fully in control
❖ Freud’s work on dreams and the unconscious had a huge influence on the
Surrealists

Calligrammes: Poems of Peace and War 1913-1916

❖ Calligrams are also knowns as ‘concrete poetry’ or ‘visual poetry’
❖ Guillaume Apollinaire was an infantry officer in WWI and was badly injured
❖ In 1918 he succumbed to the Spanish ‘flu pandemic
❖ Apollinaire coined the word ‘sur-realism’ and his book of Calligrammes is one of the
most influential of the early twentieth century
Guillaume Apollinaire’s Calligram (1918)
❖ « Salut monde dont je suis la langue éloquente que sa bouche Ô Paris tire et tirera
toujours aux allemands »
❖ “Greetings Earth of which I am the eloquent tongue which pokes from your mouth, O
Paris and will poke forever at the Germans”

René Magritte, The Treachery of Images (1929)

❖ The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my
pipe? No, it's just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture "This is
a pipe", I'd have been lying!
➢ René Magritte

Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory (1931)

❖ "The soft watches are an unconscious symbol of the relativity of space and time, a
Surrealist meditation on the collapse of our notions of a fixed cosmic order.”
➢ (Dawn Ades, 1982)

Louis Aragon (1897-1982)

❖ Louis Aragon was one of the leading voices of Surrealism in France
❖ He co-founded the Surrealist review, Littérature, with André Breton and Philippe
Soupault
❖ Paris Peasant (1926) is a Surrealist look at locations in Paris
❖ It describes two main locations: Le Passage de l’Opéra and the Parc des Buttes-
Chaumont
❖ These become backdrops for surrealist spectacles, such as the transformation of a
shop into a seascape in which a siren appears and disappears
❖ This is known as the merveilleux quotidien bringing together the marvelous and the
mundane
❖ Paris Peasant greatly influenced Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project

Paris Peasant (1926)

❖ Part of the Paris Peasant’s surrealist quality is its hybrid form: it is a novel, a prose
poem, and a philosophical tract
❖ It has no linear logic, but moves from topic to topic
❖ However, its location is the city of Paris
❖ In the Passage de l’Opéra section, it mimicks a walking tour guide, “offering an
introduction to the shops, cafes, prostitutes, and other denizens of this chosen
arcade” (V. Paris, 2013)
❖ The reader is asked “through the written text, to imagine himself immersed in
impossible simultaneities of time and space.” (Walz, in Paris, 2013)
❖ It offers a surrealist gaze on the urban landscape
❖ In France, Paris is nearly always at the center of new artistic movements
Paris and Music (1940s-60s)
❖ Paris had its own strong singer-songwriter culture, both French and international
❖ 1950s-1960s: The most well-known French singer-songwriters are George
Brassens, Léo Ferré, Jacques Brel, Serge Gainsbourgh, Juliette Gréco
❖ The 1960s brought in rock’n’roll from the U.S.A.
❖ Johnny Hallyday is the best-known Parisian rock’n’roll artist
❖ Rock’n’roll became the go-to music for young Parisians
❖ Music from the Maghreb (Algeria), Africa and the Caribbean also became popular
❖ Raï music from the Maghreb (North Africa) made inroads into the Paris music scene

Edith Piaf and Maurice Chevalier

❖ Prior to the 1950s,the Interwar years produced two Parisian performers who would
achieve international fame
❖ Edith Piaf (1915-63) was a Parisian from a working-class circus family, who began
her career singing in the streets of Paris before she was noticed by the promoter,
Louis Le Plée (Piaf is slang for ‘sparrow’)
❖ Her best-known songs are “La Vie en rose” (1946) and “Non, je ne regrette rien”
(1960)
❖ Maurice Chevalier (1888-1972) was also a Parisian working-class boy, who became
a famous actor and ended up with a Hollywood career

Juliette Greco (1927-2020)

❖ Juliette Greco incarnated the existentialist era
❖ The Greco family were active in the French Resistance during WWII
❖ Juliette’s mother and two sisters were arrested and tortured by the Gestapo
❖ At 16, Juliette spent several months in prison before being released
❖ Her mother and sisters were deported, but eventually freed when the war ended
❖ After the war, Greco led a bohemian lifestyle, frequenting the Parisian intellectuals
and artists of the day: Sartre, Camus, Jacques Prévert, Boris Vian
❖ She gained the nickname La muse de l’existentialisme
❖ 1949, Greco became friends and lovers with the U.S. jazz musician, Miles Davis; they
remained lovers even though she went on to have 3 marriages
❖ Greco was a successful singer, often turning her contemporaries’ poems into song
❖ The Beatles song, “Michelle” was inspired by Juliette Greco
❖ See link to song, Déshabillez moi (1969), in Course Content

Paul McCartney on Juliette Greco

❖ "We'd tag along to these parties, and it was at the time of people like Juliette Greco,
the French bohemian thing. They'd all wear black turtleneck sweaters, it's kind of
where we got all that from, and we fancied Juliette like mad. Have you ever seen
her? Dark hair, real chanteuse, really happening. So I used to pretend to be French,
and I had this song that turned out later to be 'Michelle'.” (Wikipedia)
Juliette Gréco, Déshabillez-moi

Georges Brassens (1921-1981)

❖ Brassens was a Parisian singer-songwriter now considered one of France’s most
accomplished postwar poets
❖ WWII, Brassens was forced to work in a labor camp in Basdorf, near Berlin
❖ On a 10-day leave, he fled to Paris and never returned to the camp. He took refuge in
a small apartment in Paris’s 14e arrondissement, and ended up staying there for 22
years
❖ Brassens wrote and sang 100 of his poems
❖ Between 1952-76, he recorded 14 albums of his music, and put other poems to
music
❖ His works are often full of dark humor with an anarchist bent
❖ He is also known for his harmonically complex music and sophisticated lyrics
❖ He was a shy performer and had difficulty performing before large crowds
❖ Over 50 dissertations have been written on Brassens
❖ See link to song, Les copains d’abord (1964), in Course Content

Des coups d’épée dans l’eau (Sword Strokes in the Water)

❖ Le siècle où nous vivons est un siècle pourri.
❖ Tout n'est que lâcheté, bassesse,
❖ Les plus grands assassins vont aux plus grandes messes
❖ Et sont des plus grands rois les plus grands favoris.
❖ Hommage de l'auteur à ceux qui l'ont compris,
❖ Et merde aux autres.

❖ The century we live in is a rotten century.

 ❖ Everything is but cowardice and baseness.
❖ The greatest murderers attend the highest Masses
❖ And are the greatest favorites of the greatest kings.
❖ Compliments from the author to those who understood this,
❖ And to hell with the others (shit to the others).

Raï Music
❖ Form of Algerian folk music from 1920s
❖ Singers of Raï are called ‘Cheb’ (young)
❖ Raï (opinion or advice) lyrics include social issues: disease, European colonialism
❖ Raï also sought to modernize traditional Islamic mores and traditions
❖ Raï developed in Algerian city of Oran, also known as ‘Little Paris’, because of the
influence of French colonization
❖ Over time, Raï became influenced by Jamaican reggae as well as the use of
synthesizers and drums
❖ Cheb Khaled has become the international singer most identified with Raï
❖ Raï music was censored by orthodox Islam, but gained popularity in France and
developed a strong cuacasian following
❖ Raï reached its height in the 1980s and became linked to antiracist struggles
❖ In 2000, the singer Sting did a duet with Cheb Mami, “Desert Rose”, and this is
credited with introducing Raï to a more global audience

Ched Khaleb, C’est la vie!

The Red Balloon, dir. Albert Lamorisse (1956)

 ❖ This 36 min film was filmed in Ménilmontant, in the Belleville area of Paris
❖ Lamorisse used his son, Pascal, and his daughter, Sabine, in his film
❖ Le Ballon rouge won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival in 1956
❖ It is also the only short film to win an Oscar for best original screenplay

Themes in The Red Balloon

❖ Le Ballon rouge follows a young boy who follows a red balloon through the streets of
Paris
❖ The grayness of the city contrasts with the red brightness of the balloon
❖ Themes of realization, loneliness, and innocence
❖ The child’s gaze transforms a cynical world into a hopeful one
❖ Myles P. Breen calls Le Ballon rouge a filmic poem: “in a poem there is no story line,
and nothing intrudes between the author and the reader.”
❖ Belleville fell into decay in 1960s and was demolished as a slum clearing effort
❖ The apartment where Pascal lives with his mother and the church, É glise Notre-
Dame de la Croix in Ménilmontant are still standing

Powerpoint Lecture: Twentieth Century Paris and Existentialism

Paris and the World Wars
❖ Twentieth-Century Europe was a period of turmoil, and much of that turmoil is
reflected in the city of Paris
❖ Following the Belle É poque were two World Wars
➢ The tragedy of WWI (1914-18) is that it led almost directly to WWII (1939-
45)
➢ “The emergence of the catastrophic ideology of fascism was partly a product
of defeat and unhappiness at the end of the Great War.” (Harison, 212)

WWI and Its Global Effects

❖ The humiliating defeat of Germany in 1918, and the unfavourable conditions of the
Treaty of Versailles in 1919 eventually led to the rise of Nazi Party
❖ In Russia, after two revolutions in 1917 and 1921, the rule of the Tzars came to an
end and Communism became the official political ideology
❖ In 1918, the Ottoman Empire had been defeated and fell apart, its territories
occupied by France and Britain; this led to the political and religious disputes in the
Middle East that still plague us today
❖ The Global map was redrawn through WWI

What was the Role of Paris?

❖ While Germany was defeated in 1918, France was quickly defeated at the start of
WWII, in 1940
❖ Paris was occupied by the Germans from 1940 to the Liberation of August 1944 (for
most of the War period)
❖ Hitler is claimed to have considered the city of Paris too beautiful to be bombed
 ❖ Parisians both resisted and collaborated with the German occupation, and with the
implementation of the Holocaust (Harison, 212)
❖ Under German occupation, France was split in two
❖ The Nazis directly controlled Paris and most of Northern France
❖ The Vichy government, under Maréchal Pétain, collaborated with the Germans and
ruled the rest of France
❖ Parisians learned to live with the German occupation
❖ Some Parisians thrived in the black market economy (especially food and cigarettes)
❖ Revenge was extracted on profiteers at the end of the war (Harison, 218)

Paris and the Holocaust

❖ The Dreyfus Affair shows that France and Paris had a strong tradition of anti-
Semitism
❖ Under the German occupation, the French police arrested nearly 12,000 Parisian
Jews (including 4000 children), who were then sent to Auschwitz
❖ In August 1944, 1,600 Parisians (Resistance fighters and civilians) were killed
fighting against the German occupation
❖ In many ways, France has not dealt fully with its collaborationist and anti-Semitic
past

Paris and the Interwar Years (1919-1939)

❖ Paris became known as the city of expats (people living in a country other than their
own, but not taking that country’s citizenship)
❖ 40,000 Americans lived in Paris, including the Modernist writers Gertrude Stein,
Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, Mary Cassat, most living on the Left Bank, frequenting
the Café Dome
❖ In 1919, Sylvia Beach set up the iconic Shakespeare and Company English-language
bookstore near Notre-Dame Cathedral
❖ In 1927, Charles Lindbergh made the first non-stop solo flight between New York
and Paris
❖ Paris was also home to many African-Americans, which led to the birth of the Jazz
Age
❖ 1920s Paris was known as Les Années folles (the crazy years, better known as the
Roaring Twenties)

Post-War Paris (1945-1960s)

❖ Even though France was losing her empire and her global dominance to the United
States and the Soviet Union, the post-war years witnessed great economic recovery
and cultural activity

The Algerian War of Independence (1954-62)

❖ France gradually lost her colonies in IndoChina (Vietnam) and North and West
Africa (Algeria, Senegal, Morocco, Madagascar)
❖ The War of Independence in Algeria divided France
 ❖ Parisian intellectuals, such as Beauvoir, Sartre and Camus, spoke up against the war
and in favor of Algerian independence
❖ While the French army used torture against Algerians, the smaller Algerian
resistance used terrorist tactics against France, often focused on Paris
❖ The war was extremely violent and bitter, and Algeria achieved its independence in
March 1962
❖ One of the effects of this was a large-scale immigration of Algerians to Paris

May 1968
❖ This was the year of the famous student revolt in Paris
❖ Students had become disillusioned with the top-down centralized university system
❖ In May 1968 they protested outside the Sorbonne and barricaded the streets
❖ They were joined by union workers, and received a lot of media coverage
❖ May 1968 graffiti slogans included:
➢ “Even if God existed, he would have to be abolished” (“Si Dieu existait, il
faudrait l’abolir”)
➢ “Be realistic: Demand the impossible” (“Soyez réalistes: demandez
l’impossible”)
➢ “It is forbidden to forbid” (“Il est interdit d’interdire”)
❖ May 1968 obtained concrete results
❖ Workers won many concessions
❖ The French university system was decentralized and rendered less anonymous
❖ The Paris University had grown to 300,000 students and become impersonal
❖ After May 1968, it was broken up into 13 autonomous units across Paris and the
banlieues
❖ The protest led to the birth of the French Feminist Movement (Le Mouvement de
Libération des Femmes, FLM)
❖ It also led to the birth of the gay rights movement

Michael Seidman, The Imaginary Revolution (2004)

❖ Seidman provides a more critical view of the effects of May ‘68
❖ He argues that the revolution was built up by the media after the fact as a
transformative moment in the Fifth Republic
❖ However, many of the changes achieved by May ‘68 were already occurring at the
beginning of the 60s
❖ What is true is that 1968 produced “a worldwide revolutionary agitation greater
than at any time since the end of World War I” (1)
❖ It also united workers and students in an unprecedented alliance: “the French
capital became the first major theater in which student and worker unrest
coincided.” (1)
❖ It brought together student idealism—fighting technocracy, hierarchy, capitalism—
and worker pragmatism—higher wages, better working conditions, fewer hours
❖ However, “May spawned two powerful but contradictory currents: first, the
libertarian/countercultural, and second, the Leninist/neo-Marxist.” (7)
 ❖ This meant trying to bring together a form of hedonistic libertarianism (American
hippy culture) with more traditional workers’ rights
❖ Ultimately, May ‘68 functioned more as a cultural revolution than as a political one
❖ “The movement wanted to change lifestyles more than to change a government …
May destroy moral hypocrisy.” (May student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit)

The Growth of Paris’s Banlieues

❖ Post-war Paris also attempted to solve the ‘problem’ of its banlieues (suburbs)
❖ It began building affordable housing, apartment blocks known as HLM (Habitation à
Loyer Modéré)
❖ Most industries had moved to the banlieues, and Paris was becoming a two-tier city
❖ The upper and middle classes lived in the center (the Paris tourists know)
❖ The working class and immigrant class lived in the banlieues
❖ The banlieues also included Bidonvilles (from bidon=can)
❖ These are slums or shanty towns inhabited largely by North-African immigrants
(from Algeria), who lived in a state of extreme poverty
❖ The banlieues of Paris have becoming increasingly racialized, and the divide
between affluent white Parisians and poor North-African immigrants continues to
be an ongoing issue for the city
❖ In the 2010s to the present day, French immigrant rap bands have been describing
the effects of the racial divide in the city of Paris

Paris and Existentialism

❖ For many, Existentialism and the city of Paris go hand-in-hand
❖ Existentialism was not only a philosophy, but a fashion, a mood, a way of life (Pop
Existentialism)
❖ It also had a distinct Parisian location
❖ After 1945, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir lived in the Latin Quarter of
Paris
❖ This was the student quarter near the Sorbonne on the Left Bank
❖ Its cafés became famous ‘Existentialist’ cafés: Les Deux Magots, Brasserie Lipp, Café
de Flore
❖ The neighborhood then attracted jazz clubs, night clubs, and tourists

Why Existentialism?
❖ Existentialist philosophy was to a large extent a response to the two World Wars
❖ However, in 1880 the philosopher Nietszche had already claimed that “God is dead”
❖ The two World Wars seemed to confirm this
❖ Existentialism argues that “existence precedes essence”
➢ This means that life is exactly what each individual makes it
➢ There is no pre-ordained plan, fate, or God
➢ There is no ‘essence’, only the absurdity of ‘existence’
➢ We are each responsible for our actions, and for the choices we make
 ❖ This responsibility is a form of freedom, but a freedom that also causes extreme
anxiety; “Man is condemned to be free” (Sartre)
❖ Existentialism was a politically engaged philosophy
❖ Sartre, Beauvoir and Camus were novelists, playwrights and political activists as
well as philosophers
❖ They all commented on and responded to the political events of the day
❖ Existentialism became a street as well as an academic philosophy, with its own
fashion (black turtlenecks and black trousers)
❖ It evolved as much in café culture and theater as in the academic space of the
university
❖ It came to define intellectual Parisian culture outside of the academy

The Key Existentialists: Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir

❖ Beauvoir attended the prestigious É cole Normale in Paris, where she met Sartre
❖ Both were studying for the competitive Agrégation exam, where Sartre narrowly
came first, and Beauvoir second
❖ At 21, Beauvoir was the youngest person ever to take and successfully pass the
Agrégation
❖ In 1929, Sartre and Beauvoir became a non-exclusive couple and engaged in a
lifelong “soul partnership”
❖ They broke all the conventional codes of their day around marriage and monogamy
❖ Beauvoir had affairs with women as well as with men

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)

❖ Jean-Paul Sartre was the main proponent of Existentialist philosophy
❖ Since Existentialism tends towards an understanding of life as ultimately arbitrary
and absurd, Sartre got accused of being a nihilist
❖ He responded with the lecture, Existentialism is a Humanism, on order to convince
people that Existentialism had a strong ethical dimension

Existentialism is a Humanism (1945)

❖ This is Sartre’s defense of Existentialism against the accusation of nihilism
❖ “In the end, is not what makes our doctrine so fearful to some merely the fact that it
leaves all possibility of choice with man?” (1)
❖ If God no longer guides our choices, the idea of choice can become terrifying
❖ Existentialists can be Christian or atheist; they are connected by the belief that
“existence precedes essence” (1)
❖ Man precedes conceptual thought, which reverses Descartes’ “I think therefore I
am”
❖ We invent ourselves through our actions: “Thus, there is no human nature, since
there is no God to conceive it. It is man who conceives himself, who propels himself
towards existence.” (2)
❖ However, in being entirely responsible for himself, man is “responsible for all men”
(2)
 ❖ “Thus, our personal responsibility is vast, because it engages all humanity.” (2)
❖ “In fashioning myself, I fashion man.” (2)
❖ However, responsibility causes anxiety: “We are alone, without excuses. That is
what I mean when I say that man is condemned to be free.” (2)
❖ Freedom, however, is intersubjective: “our freedom depends entirely on the
freedom of others, and their freedom depends on ours.” (5)
❖ Sartre argues that this is also a form of Humanism, in that “there is reality only in
the action; and more, man is nothing other than his own project and exists only in as
far as he carries it out.” (3)
❖ To this extent, “moral choice is comparable to a work of art” (3)
❖ “There is no pre-defined picture, and no-one can say what the painting of tomorrow
should be; one can only judge one at a time.” (4)
❖ “Existentialism is not despair. It declares rather than even if God did exist, it would
make no difference.” (5)

Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986)

❖ Simone de Beauvoir was the most well-known female Existentialist of her day
❖ She is best known for her feminist work, The Second Sex (1949)
❖ This ground-breaking work argued that women are not full subjects in the way that
men are
❖ Women are always conceptualized in relation to men, and not on their own terms
❖ Beauvoir’s work marked the beginning of French feminism
❖ Women in France didn’t get the vote until 1944

Women's Rights in France

❖ French Society was influenced by Catholicism and traditionally very conservative
❖ 1944: French women obtain vote (1928 in UK)
❖ 1965: Married women obtain right to work without husband’s permission
❖ 1965: Married women can open their own bank account
❖ 1967: Legalization of contraception
❖ 1975: Legalization of abortion
❖ Before 1970, husband made all the legal decisions concerning the children

The Second Sex (1949)

❖ Beauvoir both engaged with and challenged Sartre’s Existentialist philosophy
❖ She begins by challenging the category of ‘woman’
➢ “So not every female human being is necessarily a woman; she must take part
in this mysterious and endangered reality known as femininity” (3)
❖ Women have to define themselves as a category in a way men do not
➢ “If I want to define myself, I first have to say, ‘I am a woman’; all other
assertions will arise from this basic truth.” (5)
➢ ‘male’ and ‘female’ is not a symmetrical binary
➢ ‘Man’ is a universal category; literally in French ‘homme’ means ‘human
being’
 ❖ “Woman is the negative, to such a point that any determination is imputed to her as
a limitation, without reciprocity.” (5)
❖ Woman is defined by her anatomy in a way man is not (5)
❖ “Humanity is male, and man defines woman, not in herself, but in relation to himself;
she is not considered an autonomous being.” (5)
❖ “Woman is nothing other than what man decides; she is thus called ‘the sex,’
meaning that the male sees her essentially as a sexed being; for him she is sex, so
she is it in the absolute. She is determined and differentiated in relation to man,
while he is not in relation to her; she is the inessential in front of the essential. He is
the Subject; he is the Absolute. She is the other.” (6)
❖ Beauvoir’s critique of Sartrean Existentialism is that ‘man’ and ‘woman’ do not come
from the same starting place
❖ Woman never has access to the same subjective status as man; this in turn prevents
her from engaging in free, existential choices
❖ Woman exists only in relation to man and therefore cannot exist as an autonomous
subject
❖ Beauvoir shows how for ‘woman’, existence does not precede essence; woman is
essentialized by her status as other, her female body
❖ This existentialist analysis will also be applied to racialized bodies by thinkers such
as Franz Fanon (1960s)

Albert Camus (1913-1960)

❖ Albert Camus was the third famous Parisian Existentialist, although he rejected the
term, and preferred the concept of ‘absurdism’ to define his work
❖ He was a novelist rather than a philosopher
❖ His novel, The Plague (1947), returned to the best-seller list with the advent of
COVID-19
❖ Camus was also a pied noir (black foot), from a poor second-generation French
family who settled in Algeria in the 19th century
❖ Camus fully supported Algerian independence, and wanted Algerians to have access
to full French citizenship
❖ He was also an excellent football (soccer) player, but had to abandon the sport when
he contracted tuberculosis at 17
❖ In 1957, Camus won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the second-youngest ever to win
it at age 44
❖ Camus died in a car crash along with the famous French publisher, Michel Gallimard,
who was the driver
❖ Camus’s ‘absurd’ and senseless death was an ironic fulfillment of his ‘absurdist’
philosophy

Quotes from Camus’ The Plague (1947)

❖ "The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits. Our
citizens work hard, but solely with the object of getting rich. Their chief interest is
commerce, and their chief aim in life is, as they call it, 'doing business.'"
 ❖ "Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world, yet
somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a
blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history, yet always plagues
and wars take people equally by surprise.”
❖ "He knew quite well that it was plague and, needless to say, he also knew that, were
this to be officially admitted, the authorities would be compelled to take very drastic
steps. This was, of course, the explanation of his colleagues' reluctance to face the
facts."
❖ In the 1940s and 1960s, the Existentialists played the role of intellectual superstars
❖ Students in particular emulated their ideas and turned Existentialism into a fashion,
from clothing to café culture to music to a philosophy of life
❖ This led to the youth culture of the 1960s, it indirectly contributed to May ‘68, and to
the full-scale rebellion against tradition, family values, and authority more generally

Existentialism Today
❖ Existentialism tends to be a philosophy that re-emerges in times of crisis
❖ Under Covid, questions about the meaning of life have become more prescient and
existentialism has resurfaced
➢ “The fashion industry, it seems, is taking inspiration from the existentialist
movement — that flourished in Europe in the 1940s and 1950s and was
popularized as self-description by thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin
Heidegger, and Gabriel Marcel — and is more interested in exploring death
and, ultimately, the meaning of life.” (Laura Pitcher, Fashion, 2020)